Yale's Tarell Alvin McCraney Gets Major Writing Award

Dramatists Naomi Wallace, Stephen Adly Guirgis, and Yale School of Drama grad Tarell Alvin McCraney are the nine recipients of the new writing prize — and one of the most lucrative — the Windham Campbell Prizes, a new global writer’s award created with a gift from the late Donald Windham and his partner, Sandy M. Campbell, and now one of the richest literary prizes in the world. Nine $150,000 prizes were awarded for outstanding achievement in fiction, nonfiction and drama.

The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale announced the inaugural winners who range in ahe from 33 to 87, also include in fiction: James Salter, Zoë Wicomb (author of the groundbreaking Apartheid-era story collection, “You Can’t Get Lost in Capetown”) and Tom McCarthy.

In non-fiction the winners are: Jonny Steinberg, Adina Hoffman (author of “My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness,” a cultural biography of the late Palestinian poet, Taha Muhammad Ali) and Jeremy Scahill.

Fifty-nine writers from around the globe were nominated, including from India, Pakistan, Jamaica, New Zealand, Australia, Trinidad & Tobago, South Africa, the U.S., and the U.K.” says Michael Kelleher, the prize’s program director. A prize jury in each category chose five finalists, from which the nine recipients were selected to receive awards. Prizewinners did not know they were nominated, were shocked to learn they had been selected.

All nine writers will accept the prize in person at a ceremony on Sept. 10. The ceremony will be followed by a literary festival celebrating the work of the prize recipients with a series of events in New Haven.